Wellness Robots and the Path to Full Autonomy: A New Paradigm in AI-Powered Senior Care

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The senior care system faces converging pressures from an aging population, severe staffing shortages, and limited time for individual wellness programming. Existing technologies include reminder apps, fall detectors, voice assistants, and companion devices. Each of these addresses only one piece of the problem. This paper argues for a different paradigm: wellness, defined across seven interdependent dimensions, as the organizing principle for a new category of socially assistive robot. It introduces the Care Robot Autonomy Scale (CRAS), a six-level framework that measures autonomy across assessment, intervention, social intelligence, and care coordination. The paper reviews the technical capabilities such systems require, the clinical evidence gathered to date, and a phased roadmap toward higher autonomy. It closes with educational implications for care operators, researchers, regulators, and robot platform developers.